Obviously the “steal” call to action is a play on words. A “steal” in baseball is a legal play where a runner moves to another base before he can be thrown out. A “steal” also signifies getting a good deal on something. GoDaddy is not literally suggesting that people “steal” domain names, and I presume their audience of baseball watchers can figure that out.

This sign was spotted by Mike Sallese behind home plate at a New York Yankees game last night played against the Chicago White Sox in Chicago. It is important to note that the Yankees have lost 11 of their previous 14 games, and they currently sit behind the American League East leading Boston Red Sox.

About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, LLC, a company that has sold seven figures worth of domain names in the last five years. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest.

The funniest thing about the article is that the author failed to mention GoDaddy.com actually steals website names. If you don’t believe me, go to their website choose a common last name and add a company name behind it like johnsontravels.com (it has to be an available one of course) Check it about a day later, and it’ll have been bought up by, you guessed it, GoDaddy.com

Thanks for the reminder. I did a domain search for “kristiantravels.com” at GoDaddy after your comment yesterday, and it is still unregistered today.

I have a few guesses what may have happened:

1) It was coincidental. You looked up a name around the same time as someone else and they bought it.

2) You made a typographical error when you did your search. That domain name showed up as unregistered, but when you looked the next day with the correctly spelled term, it was registered.

3) There was some sort of error which showed the domain name as unregistered when it was actually registered.

4) Your ISP is monitoring your browsing and registered the name or someone else is monitoring your Internet usage or browsing and registered the name.

You can share the name with me if you would like and I will tell you when it was registered.

One thing to realize is domain registration business has tiny margins for the most part. This is why registrars like GoDaddy have so many cross sells and upsells to make money. What that means is that the risk of a PR disaster like Network Solutions’ in 2008 for frontrunning is far more problematic than it would ever be worth. This doesn’t even take potential litigation into account.

By the way, had that domain name I checked been registered and your accusation was accurate, this would have been a massive story for my blog and one that would have received a huge amount of coverage.

Alas, it is not true and the company has a policy in place to prevent this.

I reached out to a rep from GoDaddy to get their official policy, which I will share.

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